Riv’s Reviews > The Ophelia Girls > Status Update

“Her mother had seen a villain and she a saviour. But in the end he was just a man. Kind, mercurial, complicated, cruel, charismatic, damaged.”

“‘You’ve ruined me, you know,’ she told him once (…). She wanted him to feel remorse, to see what he’d done to her, but not enough remorse, maybe, to regret it either. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he laughed, ’don’t you know that it’s you who’s ruined me? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you — what have I got but growing old and grey and useless?’”

“There are dangers everywhere for young women and they come in so many shapes and sizes, forms, ages.”

“But what teenage girl is ordinary?”

“Perhaps — like the clay from my art classes that I press my thumbs into, that I knead and roll and shape — there’s a chance for me still to mould myself into something better, something stronger. Perhaps.”

“I had forgotten the current, the way the water is never still but travels. How had we never been curious about where the river came from of where it went? A river isn’t static like a pond or a bath; it flows, it moves. A river goes on and on and on.”

“She could fall so easily, fall and bruise and break; her body is that fragile, all bodies are. She hasn’t run in years and it hurts her lungs. It makes her think of other hurts, of real wounds.”

“It’s funny that despite not having f a mother myself, I seem to have picked up the natural maternal tendency to apologize. Sorry about dinner, sorry about my hair, sorry I’m not dressed up, sorry I haven’t done enough today, sorry that I’m not enough.”

“Her mother feels like she’s losing her, like Meave is slipping her grasp. She doesn’t know that Meave is already gone.”